Mexico: Securing Border Violates Human Rights

Mexico: Securing Border Violates Human Rights

June 26, 2013

The U.S. proposal to secure the southern border has caused outrage in Mexico, with one renowned Mexican academic claiming in Spanish-language media that deploying more federal agents to the region is tantamount to an increase in “human rights violations.”

Under the immigration reform bill floating around in the U.S. Senate the number of Border Patrol agents will double along the southern border and the amount of drones guarding from above will triple. The measure will also provide funding to complete 700 miles of fencing in the area and around-the-clock surveillance flights by drones.

This has ignited fury in Mexico where officials flooded Spanish-language media to express outrage this week and now some of it is getting picked up by news outlets north of the border. Mexico’s former foreign minister, Jorge Castañeda, says doubling the number of agents along the border is an “unfriendly act” and a “very negative reform for Mexico and the United States.”

Some have taken it further, asserting in a mainstream American newspaper story that the surge plan is an affront to Mexico that should be forcefully opposed by President Enrique Peña Nieto. One Mexican congressman (Fernando Belaunzaran) said “we are ‘friends and neighbors,’ as is repeated ad nauseam, but the U.S. is about to militarize the border with Mexico as if we were at war.”
A respected Mexican columnist and academic, Lorenzo Meyer, took to the airwaves suggesting that Mexico retaliate by booting U.S. intelligence and defense officials in the country collaborating in the never-ending battle against drug cartels. The same highly regarded Mexican figurehead also suggested Mexico could strike back by rejecting more American retirees. The head of a Mexico-based organization called Aztlan Binational Migrants Movement, said an increase in Border Patrol agents will put lives at risk because migrants will be forced to find more dangerous and remote crossings.

The fact remains, however, that the southern border has long been dangerously porous and it’s not just humble migrants seeking work and a better life that exploit this national security weakness. A number of reports have surfaced over the years documenting how serious criminal elements, including drug cartels and Middle Eastern terrorists, regularly use the Southwest border to enter the United States.

A few years ago an investigative committee of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) disclosed that the Mexican border region is infested with violent crimes carried out by organized syndicates that smuggle drugs, humans, weapons and money across the U.S.-Mexico border on a daily basis. Even more alarming, the assessment revealed that a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigation found that members of Hezbollah and other deadly Middle Eastern terrorist groups have entered the U.S. through the Mexican border.

As if this weren’t reason enough to secure the border, other probes have revealed similar problems. In 2007 Texas’s top Homeland Security official, Steve McCraw, confirmed that terrorists with ties to Hezbollah, Hamas and al-Qaida had been arrested crossing into the state through Mexico. That news came on the heels of a Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) report that laid out how Islamic terrorists and violent Mexican drug gangs have teamed up to successfully penetrate the U.S. as well as finance terror networks in the Middle East.

The problem has only worsened over the years, according to the government’s own assessments. In 2010 DHS warned Texas law enforcement agencies that a renowned Al Qaeda terrorist was planning to sneak into the U.S. through Mexico. In the alert DHS warn Houston authorities to be on the lookout for a member of a Somalia-based Al Qaeda group called Al Shabab who was planning to cross the Mexican border.

That same year a veteran federal agent accused the government of covering up the growing threat created by Middle Eastern terrorists entering the country through the porous Mexican border. The agent, who spent 30 years in the federal immigration system, revealed that the U.S. Border Patrol had captured thousands of people classified as OTM (Other Than Mexican) along the 2,000-mile southern border and many were from terrorist nations like Yemen, Iran, Sudan, Somalia and Afghanistan. The feds call them SIAs (Special Interest Aliens) and the government doesn’t want Americans to know about them. .

MEXICO CITY — The U.S. Senate's proposal to spend $46 billion to help secure the country's southern border may or may not persuade skeptical colleagues in the House to support broader immigration reform. But the proposal is generating some serious grumbling in Mexico.

"We are 'friends and neighbors,' as is repeated ad nauseam," Fernando Belaunzaran, a congressman with Mexico's left-wing Democratic Revolution Party, tweeted this week, "but the U.S. is about to militarize the border with Mexico as if we were at war."

"Neighbors don't do this to each other," Univision news anchor Jorge Ramos wrote in the newspaper Reforma.

On a national radio show, Lorenzo Meyer, a respected columnist and academic, suggested that Mexico retaliate by kicking out CIA and Defense Department officials who are collaborating with the government in the fight against drug cartels. Or perhaps, Meyer mused, Mexico could get back at the U.S. by refusing to accept any more American retirees.

The proposed spending spree at the border — which supporters have labeled a "surge," after the 2007 U.S. troop increase in Iraq — was included as an amendment to a broader immigration bill that appears almost certain to pass in the Senate this week. The additional spending would add nearly 20,000 Border Patrol officers, roughly doubling the current force. It would also fund the completion of 700 miles of border fencing and 24-hour surveillance flights by drones.

The Senate voted 67 to 27 on Monday to end debate on the amendment. Supporters are hoping that a lopsided approval of the immigration reform bill in the Senate will build momentum for the proposal as it heads to the House of Representatives.

In the lower chamber, some conservative lawmakers do not want to support the bill's provision of a "path to citizenship" for unauthorized immigrants, particularly because they fear it will encourage more people to sneak in. But supporters of the surge are hoping to convince skeptical House members that slipping across the border will become far more difficult.

The plan's American critics include immigrant rights advocates, budget hawks and civil libertarians wary of the expanded surveillance capabilities the Border Patrol would be granted. In Mexico, most of the complaints have come from the left, whose leaders have reiterated the long-held opinion here that U.S. border policy, with its walls, fences and armed border agents, is an insult to their nation.

A number of critics also have taken aim at the government of President Enrique Peña Nieto for not speaking out more forcefully.

"The passivity and negligence of his government is incomprehensible; it's as if this had nothing to do with him, as if this was not going to seriously affect millions of Mexicans," Ramos, the TV anchor, wrote in his column Sunday.

Peña Nieto's team has chosen to hang back from the immigration debate north of the border, apparently out of fear that any cheerleading for the cause could be construed by American conservatives as unwarranted meddling. Former Mexican President Vicente Fox's efforts to persuade Americans to accept immigration reform in 2001 led to a substantial backlash.

Fox's former foreign secretary, Jorge Castañeda, who helped lobby for a change in immigration law in 2001, said the Mexican government needed to speak out about the plan.

"Mexico can't say nothing in the face of a reform that includes doubling the number of Border Patrol agents," he said in a radio interview Monday. "It strikes me as shameful."

On Tuesday, Foreign Secretary Jose Antonio Meade delivered a measured statement in which he reiterated the government's contention that U.S. immigration reform would help millions of Mexican migrants.

But fences, Meade said, "are not the solution to the phenomenon of migration, and aren't consistent with a modern and secure border. They don't contribute to the development of the competitive region that both countries seek to promote."

The apprehension of Mexicans at the U.S. border has been trending dramatically downward since fiscal 2000, when 1.6 million Mexicans were detained. In fiscal 2012, the number was 262,000. It's likely that fewer Mexicans have been trying to cross in light of the sputtering U.S. economy, stricter border control and fear of Mexican criminals who prey on migrants.

U.S. government statistics show that the number of non-Mexicans apprehended at the border, most of whom were Central Americans, also declined from fiscal 2005 to 2011. But the number doubled from 2011 to 2012, to 94,000, probably a result of rising violence and instability in several Central American countries.

Maria Garcia, the president of the Mexico City-based Aztlan Binational Migrants Movement, said that increased border enforcement would force migrants to find even more dangerous and remote places to cross the border, putting their lives at greater risk. She also doubted that a more heavily fortified border would do much to scare off migrants seeking better wages.

"Hunger is too strong," she said. "They'll keep risking their lives."

But Alfredo Rodriguez, a 59-year-old hardware store clerk, said he could live with the border plan if the U.S. gave Mexicans more legal avenues for employment, such as temporary work visas. In any case, he said, the Americans were within their rights to beef up their security.

Why would anyone listen to a country that people are actually dieing to get away from?

Unfortunately the recoquista fantasy is used by the wealthy to diffuse anger about inequality in Mexico. Mexicans are told that their problems stem from our having taken land from Mexico. That we paid for that land is, I believe, not told to ordinary Mexicans.
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American first in this magnificent country